Sydney freight hub tussle: Defence gets in Corrigan’s way

Plans by
Chris Corrigan
’s
Qube Logistics
to set up a $1 billion freight hub in western Sydney within two years could be delayed after the Defence Department exercised its right to renew a lease over the proposed site for another five years.

The company said last night that Defence had extended its lease of land at Moorebank, near Liverpool in Sydney’s south-west, until March 2018.

Defence has the option to renew the lease for another five-year term, until 2023.

But Qube Logistics expects Defence will still move off the site by late 2014 or early 2015.

Federal Labor’s top infrastructure adviser,
Rod Eddington
, and his NSW counterpart, former premier
Nick Greiner
, have said a logistics hub is needed at Moorebank by early 2014 “at the latest".

The hub would serve as a transit point for containers switching from trucks to trains going to and from Port Botany in Sydney, easing congestion on arterial roads around the country’s second-largest container port.

Federal Labor and Mr Corrigan, Qube’s chairman, have been at loggerheads over their rival plans for freight hubs on adjacent pieces of land at Moorebank. Labor is pushing ahead with plans for a bigger hub across the road on land that will be vacated by its owner, the Defence Department, by the end of 2014.

The government’s $1.6 billion hub would be designed, built and operated by the private sector. A spokesman for federal Transport and Infrastructure Minister
Anthony Albanese
said there was “nothing stopping Qube from tendering to design, build and operate" the government’s hub.

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Labor has said the first phase of its project, a “port shuttle" to transport cargo to and from the Port Botany by rail, would be completed by mid-2017. Qube has said its shuttle would be ready by early 2014, but it now seems likely that this will be pushed out by at least a year.